Has anyone tried this?? ... Setting up a diskless media director in VirtualBox on a portable PC (laptop, netbook, X86 Tablet) and using it as an Orbiter...

I was toying with this idea in my head... since there a number of things that people (and I) would like with orbiters, like; media playback, updating/refreshing sooner, full communication control, etc.

I see from the wiki that Jamo had used a Fujitsu Stylistic 3500 as a limited media director/Orbiter,... but was wondering if anyone had done this with a VM,... and whether you were able to hack the shutdown to allow for suspend or hibernate, in order to bring the virtual machine up faster.

If anyone has done this, have you created a fake room for the device, so that it wouldn't change another media director's output by default?

I'm going to give it a go, but if anyone has beat me to the punch, I'd love any tips you might have.

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I attempted this with a KVM virtual machine on a Core i3 laptop with 4GB RAM, dual core (2 threads per). Probably due to my inexperience with KVM, I am not getting PXE booting to work (to be perfectly honest, I'm kind of a bust with KVM, overall, but need to keep working with it as it features heavily in the RHSCE/RHCE training materials). Or, I might be just forgetting to do something in LinuxMCE.

So, I get not status update from the Core that it has detected a machine at the assigned, or recognition of a boot image... or anything. It DOES appear that it is getting assigned an IP address, but one outside the normal range of a LinuxMCE controlled machine. That's making me think I just forgot to do something in LinuxMCE. In my defense, I was tired last night, not having gotten to this until 12:30 AM... Tonight should be better.

Any & all suggestions and help will be appreciated...

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I have only played around with virtualization recently but I may have something to offer in the way of the core not being able to recognize the VM.

To clarify you have a physical core already, and you want to add a virtual device inside another PC connected to that core's network?

The host OS in my experience sets up DHCP for its spawned child VMs. This is how VMs are able to talk with each other (if you allow it) as if they were physically connected using TCP/IP. Physical or virtual devices on the internal network should fall under the DHCP authority of the core. I could be off but check the network settings of your VMs and see what IPs and Subnets they are using.

This was my experience with trying Xen. I had several VMs running but had to have a v.server and v.dhcp service running with those VMs for them to network. Communication from those VMs out to my network came from one MAC and IP address. The host OS resolved packets coming back to its address and handed them down leaving the VMs none the wiser that they were virtual.

I thought I had set it up to bridge to the actual wireless NIC on the laptop,... but again, with KVM, I could be wrong... I'm a newbie with that particular VM engine (and no real expert with the others, either). So, you're saying that the host only passes it's own MAC, etc. to the network?! Do you know of any way to initiate a pass-through to the DHCP router on the Core (like a proxy and make the Core aware of it)? Note (in case it matters): The host OS is Scientific Linux 6.3, 64-bit (running KDE, not that that would matter). The i3 processor has vt-d hardware virtualization capabilities, at least (have to look up if it supports vt-x, but don't think so).

Thanks... by the way.

« Last Edit: August 08, 2012, 04:03:46 pm by JaseP »

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See my User page on the LinuxMCE Wiki for a description of my system configuration (click the little globe under my profile pic).

So, you're saying that the host only passes it's own MAC, etc. to the network?!

I am saying that in my limited tinkering that a machine running virtualized devices is viewed by its' network as one thing, the term I think is node. I find consideration of VMs as physical devices helpful here when considering their relationship to actual physical devices.

The VM doesn't have means to do anything without the host intercepting its Output, routing it to physical and then when data returns once again provide that to the VM as Input. The host does the talking for its children, and phrased my MAC address statement incorrectly. It's been a while since I dug deep into understanding transfer layers of data in TCP/IP but you can test the very basics quite simply on your network.

Does the VM have Internet access? Does the DHCP of your physical network recognize the VM seperate from its host OS?What address, subnet and gateway is the VM showing?What address range and subnet is your lmce network using?

I am sure there is some way to work a pass through with added NICs. Physical devices on a host machine are resources that can be shared between specified VMs or allocated exclusively to one. This setup is beyond my experience however so I can not provide the setting details.

The force it and see if it works method I would attempt would be pick a number and try it. Under add new device in lmce I would test by calling it a file server. Set new device number to _._.80.253. Go to your VM and set it to _._.80.253 on subnet 255.255.255.0, gateway1 <host os ip> gateway 2 = _._.80.1. Reload router and see if it's listed as a dhcp lease.

Talking to and taking ownership of are very different keep in mind and these are early connection tests only. To have this setup working properly you ultimately need to adjust settings so that when the VM boots and yells "can I get an IP please?", the core is the one who hears that and says "sure! But let me look at you first and see if you are any good to me."

If you read the warning, it says that most wireless chipsets do not support bridging. Ahw Poo! Well there goes a brilliant idea, at least with automatic configuration. I'll probably need to figure out a work around, if one exists...

Follow-up,... It appears that in order to use the work-around described above, you have to set a static IP.

So, it begs the question,... Can I set just one MD to have a static IP address, get it to boot with PXE, and the rest automatically be able to boot through PXE with DHCP working (properly)? This assumes I chose an IP address that isn't already used, of course...

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See my User page on the LinuxMCE Wiki for a description of my system configuration (click the little globe under my profile pic).

Has anyone tried this?? ... Setting up a diskless media director in VirtualBox on a portable PC (laptop, netbook, X86 Tablet) and using it as an Orbiter...

I was toying with this idea in my head... since there a number of things that people (and I) would like with orbiters, like; media playback, updating/refreshing sooner, full communication control, etc.

I see from the wiki that Jamo had used a Fujitsu Stylistic 3500 as a limited media director/Orbiter,... but was wondering if anyone had done this with a VM,... and whether you were able to hack the shutdown to allow for suspend or hibernate, in order to bring the virtual machine up faster.

If anyone has done this, have you created a fake room for the device, so that it wouldn't change another media director's output by default?

I'm going to give it a go, but if anyone has beat me to the punch, I'd love any tips you might have.

Has anyone tried this?? ... Setting up a diskless media director in VirtualBox on a portable PC (laptop, netbook, X86 Tablet) and using it as an Orbiter...

I was toying with this idea in my head... since there a number of things that people (and I) would like with orbiters, like; media playback, updating/refreshing sooner, full communication control, etc.

I see from the wiki that Jamo had used a Fujitsu Stylistic 3500 as a limited media director/Orbiter,... but was wondering if anyone had done this with a VM,... and whether you were able to hack the shutdown to allow for suspend or hibernate, in order to bring the virtual machine up faster.

If anyone has done this, have you created a fake room for the device, so that it wouldn't change another media director's output by default?

I'm going to give it a go, but if anyone has beat me to the punch, I'd love any tips you might have.

I have got this working in Virtualbox. I used it on my workstation to control my MD. I could also watch movies etc. This was with a fixed internet cable. I never did this using wireless. I do not know why it shouldn't work except from the standard wireless connection flaws (loss of conncetion risk and low speed).